In magnetic storage systems, data is commonly read from and written onto magnetic recording media utilizing magnetic transducers. Data is written on the magnetic recording media by moving a magnetic recording transducer to a position over the media where the data is to be stored. The magnetic recording transducer then generates a magnetic field, which encodes the data into the magnetic media. Data is read from the media by similarly positioning the magnetic read transducer and then sensing the magnetic field of the magnetic media. Read and write operations may be independently synchronized with the movement of the media to ensure that the data can be read from and written to the desired location on the media.
An important and continuing goal in the data storage industry is that of increasing the density of data stored on a medium. For tape storage systems, that goal has lead to increasing the track density on recording tape, and decreasing the thickness of the magnetic tape medium. However, the development of small footprint, higher performance tape drive systems has created various problems in the design of a tape head assembly for use in such systems.
When data is written to a tape, the span of data written is the span of the head elements. However, any expansion and contraction of the tape prior to reading results is similarly an expansion or contraction of the space between data tracks and, in turn, the span of written data. For instance, the width of the tape is known to change with changes in temperature (e.g. thermal expansion) and humidity (e.g. hygroscopic expansion). In addition, aging of the tape media tends to also change dimensions of the tape over time, adding to these effects for the cases of older tapes used for archiving data. Present tapes typically expand and contract by approximately 1 part in 1000, or 0.1%.
For future generations of tape heads, minimizing the spacing between concurrently written tracks is desirable for the purpose reducing the hydroscopic and thermal effects of the tape. However, as writers get spaced closer together, signal crossover between writers may occur. This crossover significantly degrades the writing performance. As a result, how closely the writers may be spaced is dependent upon providing sufficient spacing therebetween to minimize such crossover.